A Model of Melodic Expectation for Some Neo-Romantic Music of Penderecki

Abstract

Example 1 provides a piano-score reduction of the first ten measures to Penderecki's First Violin Concerto (1977). This music functions as the orchestral exposition's slow introduction: the music that follows this excerpt introduces a quicker tempo, running sixteenth notes, and a new pedal point. Scholars generally agree that this concerto, along with his opera Paradise Lost (1978), are the two earliest major works from the composer's "neo-Romantic" period, although some perceive a foretaste of this new compositional direction in the short orchestral work The Awakening of Jacob (1974). 1 Several features of this period-sometimes coexisting or interacting with Penderecki's "older" avant-garde techniques-conspicuously harken back to the common-practice style in general and the nineteenth century in particular: tertian harmonies, Wagnerian triadic progressions, Brucknerian creatio ex nihilo, traditional orchestration and instrumental doubling, continual developing variation, and protracted but not completely unfamiliar formal designs. Some of these can be heard in the ten measures of Example 1: the relentless F pedal point supports an interspersed D b -major harmony in mm. 1-5 and a shadowy tonicization of F minor, and wisps of meandering melodic material slowly emerge from this tonal adumbration in mm. 6-10.One particular facet of the twilight of Romanticism that echoes in Penderecki's music is the adoption of tonal materials such as tertian harmonies but a neglect of common-practice syntax. Predominant-dominant-tonic progressions, expected resolutions of dissonances or active scale degrees (such as the leading tone), standard cadential formulas and the like are infrequent or completely absent-although more recent works, such as his Credo (1997) and De profundis (1998), give these features a larger role to play. The excerpt from the Violin Concerto offers a modest example of this neglect: each one of the four related melodic fragments in mm. 6-10 ends unresolved within the implicit F-minor tonality. The endings on B in particular, although Penderecki clearly